The Doctor Stories

Williams’ shockingly vivid portraits of bigotry and bias ultimately serve to expose the normally opaque medical practitioner, examining the examiner where his flaws are most flagrant…The collection moves like a surgeon: It makes you uncomfortable and looks at you naked. Then, it changes you.

—Cleveland Review of Books

The Doctor Stories

The Doctor Stories collects thirteen of Williams’s stories (direct accounts of his experiences as a doctor), six related poems, and a chapter from his autobiography that connects the worlds of medicine and writing, as well as a new preface by Atul Gawande, an introduction by Robert Coles (who put the book together), and a final note by Williams’s son (also a doctor) about his famous father. The writings are remarkably direct and freshly true. As Atul Gawande notes, “Reading these tales, you find yourself in a conversation with Williams about who people really are—who you really are. Williams recognized that, caring for the people of his city, he had a front-row seat to the human condition. His writing makes us see it and hear it and grapple with it in all its complexities. That is his lasting gift.”

Paperback (published September 27, 2018)

One of the greatest poets of the 20th Century, William Carlos Williams is “The cornerstone of New Directions”

Williams’ shockingly vivid portraits of bigotry and bias ultimately serve to expose the normally opaque medical practitioner, examining the examiner where his flaws are most flagrant…The collection moves like a surgeon: It makes you uncomfortable and looks at you naked. Then, it changes you.

—Cleveland Review of Books

The Doctor Stories are clinical vignettes at their best and most engaging: dramatic, lively, full of the heroism it takes to be human.

—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A stunning combination of ease and urgency.

—Booklist

Stories written with the swift, concise, unsentimental exactitude of a great diagnostician who also happened to be a great poet.

—Philip Gourevitch

This is powerful but not comfortable reading, in the prose of a poet and the vision of a healer. I wish all doctors would read it.

—The Wall Street Journal

More books by this author

New Directions was founded in 1936, when James Laughlin (1914–1997), then a twenty-two-year-old Harvard sophomore, issued the first of the New Directions anthologies. “I asked Ezra Pound for ‘career advice,’” Laughlin recalled. “He had been seeing my poems for months and had ruled them hopeless. He urged me to finish Harvard and then do ‘something’ useful.”